‘Banks are already producing redundancy reports. Bank VTB Severo Zapad, for instance, is about to make 189 employees redundant. These are mainly lending experts that were formerly employed in the bank’s subsidiaries,’ says Yekaterinburg Employment Center’s Deputy Director Anatoly Kudryashov.

In the meantime, the region’s State Labor Inspection reported as many as twenty-six Sverdlovsk Region-based enterprises had asked a number of people to leave by October 15, 2008.